Cosy Mathermatical Sense of Wellbeing

 Eve Babitz on writing and art (source):

In the tenth grade I took a test and got the highest grade in the city in grammar. I had learned the kind of cosy mathematical sense of wellbeing you can derive from a parsed sentence. I liked the way a sentence looked all Royal Familyed up with bloodlines and right angles, all those reasons. But it seemed to me after looking at it that a point that parses is a point that people’d rather go to the circus to avoid seeing than hang around and appreciate ... I wonder if [Picasso] felt the same way when someone said, ‘you can’t draw a face like that’ when the fact that the person could tell it was a face meant you could, as I felt when an instructor said ‘“be” is never a noun.’